


when the wind is warm or the crickets sing

by magneticwave



Category: Practical Magic (1998), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 10:53:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being normal is not necessarily a virtue. // Or, the wedding of Dr. Lydia Martin and Jackson Whittemore, Esq.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the wind is warm or the crickets sing

**Author's Note:**

> I needed something happy in my life, so I wrote what is essentially a literary bit of muslin. The news that Jackson and Erica are both leaving made me sad, so I’m pretending that they will leave together and go on snarky East Coast adventures while the pack sorts its shit out, and eventually Lydia joins them there. Why? Because it’s hiatus, that’s why.

Lydia is married in an Anna Maier for Ulla-Maija lace sheath, her lips a red bow parted over brilliant teeth, and the photographer actually forgets to snap a picture for the first three steps that she takes down the aisle on her father’s arm—he gapes, kneeling slightly to the left of the pew holding Lydia’s mother (crying), grandmother ( _sobbing_ ), and her father’s girlfriend (perplexed), fumbles with his camera, and then remembers that Jackson is paying him an absurd amount of money to take as many flattering pictures of Lydia as possible.

For a brief moment, as Lydia twitches her train to the side so it doesn’t catch on someone’s purse, a slightly anxious knot rises in her throat. She feels everyone’s stares, clogged with moisture and overlaid with the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, pressing against the outside curves of her body. Even with the full length of the veil over her face, she is incredibly conscious of the air that outlines her flesh and the people that occupy that space.

Then, her father is depositing her at the altar and Lydia hands Allison her bouquet of gladioluses as her father formally gives Jackson her hand. The sobbing in the front row reaches a crescendo as Lydia’s father returns to his seat—her mother wants him to feel especially guilty and maybe pick up more than half of the bill for the rehearsal dinner, that’s _incredibly_ obvious—and the suffocating pressure vanishes as Jackson shakily lifts her veil and lightly runs his thumb down the edge of her hairline.

Somewhere there is a child’s dictionary spread open to the Ps, and there is a picture of Jackson, in this moment, with **pole** **-ax or pole** **-axe v.** _to strike or fell as if with a poleax_ printed underneath it.

 _I love you_ , Lydia thinks, slightly hysterically. _I have never loved or understood another human being like I love you_. That should be obvious, considering that she thinks it in the middle of their wedding, but it still makes Lydia panic. Relationships wherein she is not 100% in control are still few and far between—they remind her uncomfortably of Peter Hale and his calm, “I think you’re going to get through this with a minimum of post-traumatic stress,” and Lydia moved to the other side of the country so she wouldn’t have to share anything more than four days at Christmas with Peter.

 _I love you_ , under these circumstances, feels uncomfortably like _what the hell am I doing here_.

The rings are both new—engagement from Tiffany & Co., wedding from Harry Winston—and cold on Lydia’s left hand without the weight of memories. The head of her coven had taken Lydia aside when she and Jackson had announced their engagement and gravely pointed out that doing magic with newly forged rings was begging for trouble. “The land likes the old and connected, Lydia,” Sally had explained, eyeing the cushion-cut stone as though the two rows of bead-set diamonds surrounding it personally offended her.

The thought of browsing through Sotheby’s and digging up a set of rings with enough diamonds to appease the jackals at Jackson and Erica’s law firm and enough history to soothe Lydia’s coven had been unbearably oppressive; Lydia is pressured enough by the other facets of her existence to not want to add centuries of unmet expectations in the form of the physical manifestation of her marriage.

“Somehow, generations untold of witches before me have managed to function without antiques,” Lydia had said to Sally, flicking her hair over her shoulder and admiring abstractly the way that the light had beamed from her hand. “I’ll manage.”

Sally had quietly huffed over her lower lip and then said, “ _Fine_ , it’s not like we’ve ever managed to convince you to listen when you don’t want to,” and, mumbling unkind things about redheads under her breath, had gone off to collect Gilly, Kylie, and Toni so they could cast an engagement blessing in the bathroom, away from the prying eyes of the assorted associates and partners from Hopkins, Henderson, & Stone.

Lydia rarely second-guesses herself, but as Jackson slips her wedding band onto her finger, his lips thin and white as he rattles through his vows, she thinks about Sally’s words under the gazebo in the side garden of the house on Maria’s Island. There are other important elements elsewhere—myrtle and English lavender in the bridesmaid bouquets, rosemary in the boutonnieres, English statice pinned to the pews, and Lydia’s feet are going to _ache_ after the reception from the twin coins pressing into her squashed toes—and her coven had thrown her a second, more exclusive, infinitely wilder bachelorette party that had ended with all of them dancing naked through the topiary maze, drunk on margaritas and chanting blessings to the new moon—so it’s not as if Lydia’s marriage is going to die from the sheer bad luck of her new rings.

She tells herself this twice, curling her fingers under to run her nail along the line of the metal band. If she concentrates hard enough, she can feel the engraving, _tá tú mo ghealach_ , that Jackson had insisted on having done on the inside of the ring. The exposed metal begs for her magic; it’s unstable and eager. But then again, so is Lydia.

When she says her vows and pushes the ring over the thick knuckle of Jackson’s left ring finger, Lydia’s voice is calm and strong and any part of her that feels bruised or scared is suppressed by the knowledge that she is surrounded by people that love her, yes, but also people that are vital to her and Jackson’s professional futures; these people need to be impressed. Lydia is very good at being impressive.

As the priest declares them man and wife, Lydia carefully bites through her lip. The pain is focusing and she uses it as Jackson slants their mouths together and Lydia tongues her blood against his lower lip. She doesn’t have a hope in hell of permanently scarring him, but she makes sure that their blood mingles in the joint cavern of their mouths. The mixture is salty, like the wind off that blows off of the Atlantic, and Lydia has to swallow it so that Jackson’s blood isn’t taken back by the greedy pull of his healing body.

The aunts are too old to be out of bed on a freezing December morning, but their well wishes scent the air around Sally and Gilly as they fold Lydia into their arms in unison. “Blessed be, child,” Sally whispers into her hair.

“You caught a hot one,” Gilly adds. “So you’re already outpacing Toni in that sphere.”

“Do me a favor, Aunt Gillian,” Toni says as she waddles into their circle, “and shut the hell up about my husband.”

“ _Touchy_ ,” Gilly says, grinning. “You have to admit, Jackson’s a fox and he’s gonna stay one until he’s old and grey and still a total ass.”

“He’s _my_ ass,” Lydia replies calmly, as Kylie gathers her up from behind. The nestled warmth of her coven fills her with a brilliant kind of peace. Inside of their circle, she can hear the heartbeat of Toni’s baby and smell the greenhouse on their skin and hear the creaking of the house on Maria’s Island.

“Blessed be,” the Owenses say as one, and Lydia isn’t the maudlin type and she’s not going to be so unkempt as to cry and ruin her perfect eyeliner; she swallows back the salt and the tears and breathes through.

“Blessed be,” Lydia echoes, and then she laughs. “Make nice with the pack at the reception; if I hear any sign of cursing, I’m going to evict all of you before we even get to the cake.”

With an exaggerated leer in Allison’s direction that would make Stiles proud, Kylie says, “I’m going to be so nice that she won’t even know what hit her.” Even without advanced werewolf senses, Allison has her hunter’s instinct to clue her in; she half-turns in their direction and narrows her eyes at Kylie’s prompt smoldering.

Lydia lightly elbows Kylie in the stomach. “Keep your hands off of my maid of honor, Owens.”

“I’ll be the epitome of romantic,” Kylie promises, waggling her eyebrows now. “Flowers, chocolates, hex bags. We’ll be able to tell our children that it was love at first conversation about crossbow bolt suppliers.” Allison, across the lawn and half-involved in fending off a pair of first-year associates, smothers a laugh at Kylie’s face. “She thinks I’m charming,” Kylie coos. “Look at her.”

“Good luck,” Lydia tells her drily. “You’ll need it.”

“That’s why you should definitely fling the bouquet in my direction,” Kylie says seriously. “I’ll need all the myrtle for luck that I can get. I’ll plant a whole garden of myrtle, if she’ll go out with me.”

Toni says, “You’re _pathetic_ ,” in a tone of deep amusement, and, as Kylie snaps back something about Toni’s husband being cross-eyed, Gilly and Sally take control of them, shuffling them off so that Lydia is free to shake hands with the rest of the reception line.

After most of the guests have collected their cars and driven for the reception site, right before the wedding party gathers for photographs, the pack descends en mass to put Lydia and Jackson in the middle of a huge vertical puppy pile. “You guys were _so cute_!” Stiles shouts from the inner edge, where he, as the tallest, has Derek wedged under one armpit and Jackson under the other. “First pack wedding equals unmitigated success, methinks.”

“It’s not over yet,” Jackson points out in a deeply pained voice. “Jesus, Stilinski, get your smelly pit off of my goddamn hair.”

“ _Love_ ,” Stiles hums, “ _love will keep us together_ ,” and Scott and Isaac both press against Lydia and pretend that they aren’t scent-marking her over the oil and tincture taint of her coven. She loves them all, even though they’re morons, so she endures their antics with some good grace. Erica and Boyd are the subtlest about it; Erica mostly just presses her breasts against Lydia’s back and sings the chorus to the song that Stiles is apparently seriously invested in completing.

Allison nestles closer to Lydia’s left arm and makes a low noise in the back of her throat, in lieu of singing, and Lydia closes her eyes and lets the pack push her and Jackson together, from hip to chest, and she kisses him in the massive lump of their pack. The cut on her lip is scabbed over, even as his is already healed, but he tongues over the clot and sucks her lip into his mouth and swallows, a little compulsively, the poorness of his control betrayed by the way that his teeth clatter against hers.

“ _STOP_ ,” Stiles half-shouts, “ _oooh_ , _CAUSE I REALLY LOVE YOU_ ,” and Derek growls, “ _Stiles, shut the hell up_ ,” and Lydia feels nothing but the pack and the scent of lavender and myrtle against the base of her throat.

She feels subsumed as she whispers, “ _let love keep us together_ ,” and then, louder, she asks, “Really, Stiles? Of all of the songs?”

“It seemed appropriate,” Stiles replies, unrepentant. “Oh, hey, I think your photographer is going to cry if we don’t let him take a photo of you in the next five minutes. Does he remind anyone a little uncomfortably of Matt, right now?”

Jackson says, in his lethally smooth way, “Not if he wants to get paid,” over which Isaac says, much more baldly, “Not if he wants to _live_.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t be a pack occasion if there wasn’t at least one death threat,” Allison observes, resigned.

“No one is dying on my wedding day,” Lydia says firmly, with enough threat that Stiles sucks his next smart comment back into his mouth. “I did not spend thirty hours picking out this dress so that one of you could get overeager and splatter blood on it.”

“…okay,” says Stiles, meekly, and the rest of the pack mumbles in agreement.

Lydia gets her wish: No one dies at the reception. They all separate the next evening—the Owenses back to the island, Erica to her apartment in the city, the pack to California, Allison to Florida—as Lydia and Jackson board their flight to Paris. Lydia bullies Jackson into the aisle seat and she takes the window, the better to watch Boston fall away from their feet and the cloud layer descend to greet them.

Everything looks crisp and white from the plane window. It’s easy to project the sort of future that Lydia wants onto those clouds. Even though she should know better, Lydia closes her eyes and twists her fingers in her lap, pressing her right thumb against the top of the center diamond of her engagement ring. _Blessed be_ , she prays.

**Author's Note:**

> tá tú mo ghealach | _you are my moon_


End file.
